River Ryan, Jazz Chisholm, and Baseball’s Most Injured Teams

Thanks to the trade deadline, this is a quiet time of the year for transactions, but baseball’s injured list is always hopping, and Tuesday was sadly no exception. First came the announcement that Dodgers pitching prospect River Ryan, our 21st-ranked prospect on the Top 100, would require Tommy John surgery, ending his 2024 season, and at best keeping him out for the vast majority of 2025. Not to be left out of the UCL injury party, Jazz Chisholm Jr. injured his left elbow on a slide into home plate on Monday night. The exact severity of Chisholm’s injury is still unknown, but with the season rapidly reaching its conclusion, any significant time on the shelf could imperil his ability to help the Yankees in their playoff push this year.

Chisholm was easily the biggest addition the Yankees made at the deadline, a flexible offensive player who the team hoped would bring some emergency relief to an extremely top-heavy offense that has received an OPS in the mid-.600s from four positions (first base, second base, third base, and left field). And Chisholm was more than fulfilling that expectation, with seven home runs in 14 games on the back of a .316/.361/.702 slashline. As noted above, the full extent of his injury isn’t yet known, but in a tight divisional race with the Baltimore Orioles (and with a playoff bye at stake), every run is precious. The Yankees have had a curious amount of misfortune when it comes to the health of their deadline acquisitions in recent years; between Frankie Montas, Scott Effross, Lou Trivino, Andrew Benintendi, and Harrison Bader, you might get the idea that they mostly acquire medical bills in their trades.

Meanwhile, the Dodgers, as is often the case for the team, have had more than their share of pitching injuries, with the IL rotation of Walker Buehler, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tony Gonsolin, Dustin May, and Emmet Sheehan likely superior to most team’s healthy rotations. With so many injuries, the Dodgers promoted Ryan to the majors. He was solid (if occasionally wild) in his 5 1/3 inning debut against the Giants, and his one-run, eight-strikeout effort against the Astros guaranteed he’d get more starts as long as he performed. Unfortunately, he was only able to make two more starts before he hit the shelf; he was removed in the fourth inning of Saturday’s game against the Pirates due to forearm tightness. The returning Buehler is expected to start on Wednesday, giving the team a rotation of him, Tyler Glasnow, Jack Flaherty, Clayton Kershaw, and Gavin Stone — at least until someone hurts an elbow, tweaks an oblique, or gets run over by a cartoon steamroller.

The Dodgers have been enormously resilient in the face of their injuries, making their 71-49 record, the best in the National League, even more impressive than it would be otherwise. But they likely don’t find the scene in their rear view mirror to be a pleasant one, with the Diamondbacks and Padres both going on a tear in recent months. Despite going 15-10 over their last 25 games, a 97-win pace over a full season, the Dodgers have seen their eight-game lead slashed in half. Other teams with injury issues have been less successful, with the Atlanta Braves coming most immediately to mind. While the general encrapification of much of their offense shoulders a good bit of the blame, Atlanta has suffered a number of injuries to key players, most notably 2023 NL MVP Ronald Acuña Jr., as well as rotation stalwart Spencer Strider.

So do the Dodgers and Braves actually have the best case for cursing the injury gods? And where do the Yankees stack up? Since I’m always looking for an excuse to bring some extra nerdery to my baseball analysis, this seems like a good time to check in on which teams have lost the most value due to injury or, at least, have the most value on the IL instead of the lineup card. To do this, I took the missed time for all 622 players who have appeared on the IL this year, calculated a full, healthy WAR projection in ZiPS at the time of their injury, and then pro-rated for the actual missed time so far. Note that this is the potential value lost to injury, not necessarily the number of lost wins, since teams with a lot of injuries naturally couldn’t play everyone full-time in a healthier scenario. Trying to unwind injuries to do that would create a lot of impossible counterfactuals, such as trying to figure out how quickly the Yankees would have turned to Luis Gil if Gerrit Cole had been healthy to start the season. Let’s dive in:

I swear, on my inalienable right to refuse to eat Cincinnati-style chili, that I didn’t put my thumb on the scale to have the Dodgers and Braves come out on top here. Remember, this doesn’t mean the Dodgers actually lost 14 wins, or that they would have been 85-35 if healthy, only that they lost that many potential wins. There’s no plausible way that they could have fully utilized a healthy Glasnow, Stone, Yamamoto, Kershaw, Miller, Buehler, Gonsolin, and May simultaneously.

Also ranking highly are the Texas Rangers, whose plan to have a bunch of injured starting pitchers make triumphant returns around midseason will probably turn out to be too little, too late. The Red Sox have been surprisingly resilient at the edges of the playoff race, and they’ve done so having lost Lucas Giolito, Trevor Story, Triston Casas, and Garrett Whitlock. The Marlins losing most of their rotation during the spring is a well-known disaster, and the Astros had to weather a lot of their starters missing time in the early months of the season.

On the flip side, the Royals have been quite fortunate with their injuries, with ZiPS not seeing a single one as particularly impactful. That the Blue Jays and Tigers have generally stayed healthy makes their respective seasons look a lot more depressing; they actually had the guys they wanted on the roster available. Good health aided the Nationals in remaining tantalizingly close to relevance through the season’s early months, and while the Phillies endured six-week IL stints from Trea Turner and J.T. Realmuto, they’ve largely avoided serious injuries that would have tested their offensive depth, especially in the outfield. As for the Yankees, despite the perception that they’ve been bit especially bad by injuries, the estimate of 6.5 potential wins lost only ranks 10th in the league, a half-win above the average of 6.0. Cole was a big one, and poor health has plagued much of their bullpen, but the losses here weren’t notably debilitating compared to the typical team.

When evaluating team projections at the end of the season, which players actually end up getting playing time is just as crucial in predicting a team’s record as how accurate the individual projections are. While teams have gotten considerably better over the last 20 years at identifying which players are good at baseball, figuring out how to keep everyone healthy is still baseball’s El Dorado. Until that unlikely day, injuries will continue to be the bane of teams’ (and fans’) existence, and we’ll continue the tally.